Attention has been drawn to SiC (silicon carbide) as a semiconductor material which can manufacture power devices excellent in heat resistance, high voltage resistance, and power saving. However, SiC is a material which has the second highest hardness behind diamond and thus is hard to process, whereby low-speed processing or frequent blade replacement is required when a planar object to be processed comprising an SiC substrate is to be cut by blade dicing. Hence, a laser processing method has been proposed, which irradiates the object with laser light, so as to form a modified region within the SiC substrate along a line to cut, thereby cutting the object along the line from the modified region acting as a start point (see, for example, Patent Literature 1).